Post-‘Logan,’ DC Is Willing to Hop on R-Rated Superhero Bandwagon

It would appear that the likes of Deadpooland Logan, what with all their foul words and visible bloodletting, have changed the game of superhero movies. It was once basic showbiz logic that a massively-budgeted capes-and-tights flick couldn‘t afford to go for an R rating and lose the portion of the audience that it would restrict. More minor one-off projects like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman could take that risk and repeatedly found that it paid off, but now mainstream heroes have adopted this more daring approach and met with attractive box-office receipts. And in keeping with their tried-and-true business strategy of doing everything Marvel does, but a year later, DC Films apparently intends to get into more mature material.

TheWrap’s resident scoop-getter Umberto Gonzalez has posted a new item in which he quotes one of his infamous “well-placed insiders” as confirming that DC’s top brass would be willing to go for the hard-R in future projects. The exact quote? “One hundred percent, yes. With the right characters.”

Makes perfect sense, too. Zack Snyder’s universe-defining Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, along with the recent Oscar-winning Suicide Squad, all appeared to chafe under their PG-13 ratings. It was as if you could feel the desire to go darker in the films, but they’d been forcibly cleaned up for mass consumption. (BvS was later released on Blu-ray in an R-rated “Ultimate Edition.”) With Fandango’s polling data clearly indicating that audiences are clamoring for more adult material, the tides could be changing. Here’s hoping that DC has the presence of mind to recognize that Deadpool and Logan found an audience because they tried something original, unlike the glut of other superhero movies, and not because of the letter that the MPAA appended to them.